Howard Lake-Waverly Herald, Nov. 20, 2000

Wright officials keep eye on Florida election debacle

By John Holler

Since Nov. 7, most of us have, to varying degrees, followed
the soap opera that has become the Florida vote in the presidential election,
a debacle that has made celebrities out of county officials and ballot counters,
and has put words like "hanging chad," "swinging chad,"
and "pregnant chad" into the lexicon.

But few people have watched it with more insight than Doug
Gruber and Gloria Gooler. Gruber is the Wright County auditor/treasurer,
the person in charge of election tallying for the county, and Gooler is
the county's election supervisor. As the final results of the presidency
were held up, both were thankful for one thing in particular.

"I'm just really glad I'm here in Minnesota and not
down there," Gruber said. "We have worked our staff pretty intensely
in the weeks leading up to the election. I can only imagine what kind of
pressures those counties are under."

However, the problem facing Florida is something that wouldn't
and couldn't happen in Minnesota or in Wright County. Why? The election
process in Florida uses punch cards (the holes in those cards are called
chads) and those have been done away with in Minnesota for similar problems.

"The City of Monticello used to use a punch card system,
but that was terminated," said Gooler, who oversaw her 10th election
night as a county employee Nov. 7. "That was part of Minnesota election
law, because the system was really out of date and led to problems. I knew
the word "chad" long before it became used so much in the last
week or so, because we had to deal with those before."

The horror stories coming out of Florida have been a staple
of newspaper reports and television broadcasts, including tales of lost
ballots, confusing ballots and even Holocaust survivors inadvertently voting
for Pat Buchanan - a candidate who has praised some of the economic policies
of Adolph Hitler in published interviews. However, while such concerns have
affected voters in Wright County, those types of problems are eliminated
in the Minnesota voting system.

"I've had people contact our office worried about
their votes, but that isn't a problem," Gooler said. "We have
39 precincts in Wright County (including four in the City of Buffalo and
two in the City of St. Michael) and 26 of those are done by optical scanning
and 13 are done by hand count on paper ballots.

"If someone accidently votes for the wrong person,
they can tell an election official and get a new ballot. If they accidently
vote for two different candidates, which is apparently a big problem in
Florida, the optical scan machine won't accept the ballot and gives a printed
explanation why, saying that someone has voted twice in one race."

A bigger problem, Gruber said, is the antiquated punch
card system, which was outlawed in Minnesota several years ago. Gruber went
to school at St. Cloud State University and, in 1974, he worked in the computer
lab at the university and saw first-hand the flaws in the punch-card system.

"Those cards aren't intended to be handled or used
often," Gruber said. "They are easily damaged and the more times
they are handled or run through a machine, the more fragile they become
and can cause problems."

Gruber said the presidential election has been a Catch-22
that always seems to happen in close elections. In his job as county assessor,
he said just about every time there was a mistake made in assessing values
of property, it was in the most contentious areas of the county. The same,
he said, is true in Florida, where George W. Bush's brother is the governor,
and the secretary of state, who has the final word on the state election,
was the co-chair of Bush's presidential campaign in Florida.

"These things always seem to happen in the most volatile
areas," Gruber said. "It seems like whenever there is a discrepancy,
it always seems to come in areas where people can think there is some kind
of conspiracy involved."

While Minnesota's election system is far from perfect ­
until 1996 there wasn't one uniform ballot in Wright County ­ it is
a vast improvement over the systems used in other states. Minnesota is known
for its voter participation - Gruber said that 80 percent of the eligible
voters in Wright County turned out Nov. 7 to vote.While the cost may be
extensive to upgrade election systems everywhere, the problems that have
been under the spotlight in Florida could have a positive conclusion in
the long run.

"If anything good comes out of this ridiculous situation
in Florida, it would be that the federal or state governments will come
up with a standardized system for voting," Gooler said. "Something
needs to be done."

"There are some positives that will come from this
mess," Gruber added. "If states go to a standard ballot, that
will be a plus. It's also educated a lot of people to the electoral process
both adults, and students in social studies or civics classes.

"I think it has taught a lot of people about how the
election process works, what the electoral college is, and the importance
of voting. If it has done anything good, it has educated a lot of people
to a process they may not have known about prior to this."